Sela Iron-Tally

Sela Iron-Tally posts from a Guild-honor bond-audit desk on Khesret with the tired patience of a dwarf who has spent three lifetimes proving other people's math wrong and would like, just once, to be surprised by an honest tally.

She's Guild-honor, not debt-clan — iron-beadwork in her hair, ink-stained fingers, a voice that never quite rises because on Cold Hold docks she learned that volume is how liars compensate. She hires offworld hulls because offworld hulls aren't in anybody's beadwork yet: clean enough to walk into an unregistered hold, small enough not to look like a raid, and — she assumes — smart enough to copy one ledger line without starting a feud. The job is framed as a courtesy audit: verify a single Stone-Braid / Ash-Braid clearance line from season 77.041, bring back the copy, say nothing to the Stone-Braids. ₡6,000, LOW on the board, two hops past Hardfell Core to a hold the Concord charts don't name.

What Sela does not say in the briefing is why she needs that line. A mutual client swears the clearance was forged; Sela believes the forgery story just enough to spend coin. What she cannot afford is for the line to name kin she wasn't cleared to know — especially not the hold-reeve who keeps Cold Hold's dock. She chose this crew because they look like folk who can be quiet in a ledger alcove. Whether that's a compliment or an indictment depends on what they bring back.